In what scenarios would using regular expressions (Regex) be more suitable for extracting data from HTML pages compared to simpler string manipulation functions in PHP?

Regular expressions would be more suitable for extracting data from HTML pages compared to simpler string manipulation functions in PHP when the data you need to extract follows a specific pattern or format that can be described using a regular expression. Regular expressions provide a more powerful and flexible way to search for and extract data based on patterns, making them ideal for parsing HTML content which can be complex and varied. 

$html = file_get_contents('https://www.example.com/page.html');

// Extract all links from the HTML using a regular expression
preg_match_all('/<a\s[^>]*href=(\"??)([^\" >]*?)\\1[^>]*>(.*)<\/a>/', $html, $matches);

// Print out the extracted links
foreach ($matches[2] as $link) {
    echo $link . "\n";
}

Keywords

Regular expressions Regex data extraction HTML pages string manipulation.

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